As Rick Caruso descended from a vintage fire truck and made his way through the glitter and lace of Salon Princesita, a South Los Angeles hall that is booked out every weekend for quinceañeras, eight cockatiels squawked in unison with the hall of supporters. Owner Sergio Arias cares for his birds and knows how much they charm his guests, and he was equally proud to have them host the mayoral candidate.
Caruso was a charmer, too, as he took to the stage and wooed his constituents.
“You got a dimple in your tie,” Caruso told an 11-year-old student of Monseñor Oscar Romero Charter School. “That is a really classy detail,” With that, Caruso scored a laugh from the audience, one of many to come as he made his way through a series of questions from the boy. It was the same kind of laugh he tries to elicit when diverting attention away from uncomfortable questions – like why he suddenly registered as a Democrat just before running for mayor.
The boy had come with his father, a local businessman, and joined Caruso in front of a 50-odd crowd under a tented extension of the quinceañera venue.
Caruso proceeded to lay down a version of his plan “to end homelessness” that included declaring a state of emergency, and how, because he is a builder, he can build houses fast.
Just before the boy returned to join his father, also in suit and tie, proudly capturing the scene with his smartphone, Caruso asked if he thought he could accomplish his plan.
“He can do it,” the boy declared. “Worship Caruso!”
The audience cheered, and embraced the religious tone. Many wore blue-billed caps embroidered with “Rick Caruso for mayor.”
The give-and-take often sounded as if the audience’s caps were red. They see Caruso as a businessman, not a politician – as an outsider who would not raise taxes but would amp-up money for the police. Out with the establishment and in with him – a man not drawn to a life-long career in politics but driven to clean-up a corrupt city hall.
“When you have crime, when you have homelessness, when you have the encampments, when you see the struggle, it dampens dreams,” Caruso said. “It takes away people’s optimism that Los Angeles is the land where dreams come true. I believe it still is. I’ve had my dream, beyond my imagination. God has been abundantly good to me.”
“You’re blessed!” an audience member called out.
“I am blessed beyond blessed. And now it’s time to get back.”
That was how the question-and-answer session started.
Los Angeles, a Democratic stronghold, has not seen a Republican mayor since Richard Riordan ended his term in 2001. Though he was the first Los Angeles mayor to be term-limited out of office, there had not been a Republican mayor for 30 years before him.
Riordan endorsed Rick Caruso in May 2022, four months after Caruso joined the Democratic party. He moved between Republican and unaffiliated over the last decade.
The switch gave Caruso a peculiar hybrid identity that has attracted voters unsettled by the ever-growing homelessness crisis coupled with the growing financial impact on the middle class. With inflation, housing and energy costs on the rise, many constituents are looking for someone who may bring about change.
L.A.’s establishment politicians took a hit in October after recordings were leaked in which city council members Nury Martinez, Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León engaged in racist conversation while discussing redistricting issues. The tapes upended city government and public trust.
This is where Caruso positions himself, with his pointy leather shoes and silk tie, ready to step in as an outsider with a history of business success. To his supporters, he already built the ideal city.
It’s called the Grove, a fantasy made real, where leisure is encapsulated by merchandise and a grand boulevard leads you into the insulated and pristine bowels of courtyards where cocktails, pasta and fountains spout as a trolley train carries tired shoppers and their labradoodles.
It’s nostalgic for a Hollywood Europe in California that was never here, and futuristic by inventing one.
If he built that, surely his supporters believe, he could do the same for greater Los Angeles.
A day of images to set the record
Before arriving at Salon Princesita, Caruso met a restaurant owner and sat for an exclusive interview with Telemundo at St. Lawrence of Brindisi, a Catholic church in Watts and a beneficiary of the Caruso Foundation.
Caruso funds a church school program called Operation Progress, offering mentorship opportunities for children in Watts. Caruso’s devotion to the Catholic church includes investments across the city; at USC, he founded the Caruso Catholic Center and erected Our Savior Parish Church on the campus of his alma mater.
The project left many in a quandary about his pro-abortion-rights stance, which he professes when asked.
In an interview with Annenberg Media he underlined his views and denounced his opponent Karen Bass for what he said was her politicizing the issue. He then went on to say that Bass gave money to a congressman in Georgia who pushed for the Hyde Amendment, a law that bans federal Medicaid from funding abortions.
Bass signed the Women’s Health Protection Act in 2021, which is aimed at protecting abortion rights. Meanwhile, Caruso has given over $1 million to lawmakers such as Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy who worked to strike down Roe vs. Wade.
Caruso then went on to meet with the Los Angeles Fire Department at Station 64 in Watts. The United Fire Fighters Union endorsed him. Though campaigning is not allowed on city property, the compound boasted a fire truck dressed in Caruso flags, and a fire pit with chairs around it, set for what looked like would be a fireside chat. Organizers asked Annenberg Media reporters to leave the station before the candidate’s private session.
A bit later in the day, Caruso boarded a vintage fire truck adorned with rooftop seats for a ride around L.A. He donned his LAFD cap and joined family, friends, and uniformed men for a view of the city.
When they arrived at the quinceañera hall it was dusk and the party was frigid. But a taco truck awaited them, and his town hall constituents were well past their first serving.
Back at the hall
When the microphone started to go around the room the first to take hold of it was Barbara McFarlin, an impassioned Black woman who spoke her truth much to the discomfort of the Caruso campaign staff.
“I like you because you are an outsider,” McFarlin said. “You’re like Donald Trump.”
Note to historians: She wasn’t the first to draw the comparison with another big-city builder. Way back in 2007, before Caruso bared his political aspirations and during his rise as a developer, a book editor for the L.A. Times, David L. Ulin, called him the Donald Trump of Los Angeles.
McFarlin, though, was speaking about a Trump of a different era, one who as president transformed the rhetoric of the Republican Party and wove his image as an American-made business tycoon with the language and aesthetics of mid-century European fascism.
Caruso didn’t challenge McFarlin or contradict her view. His staffer called out to her, pressing if she had a question. She didn’t, she just wanted to share. He took the microphone from her.
L.A. Times paints Caruso like a son of Tony Soprano
In a November 3 article, the L.A. Times depicted Caruso as a family man who could hold his family’s past, while forging a future empire based on his own imaginings. If he had listened to them, he would still have been a lawyer.
He is Catholic, of Italian descent, his father spent time in jail in the 1960s for cheating people out of money in car sales. He got his moral fiber from his mother, and his business smarts from his dad. His dad never wanted him to go into politics, but he cherished his vision for the Grove, realizing a bygone era of cleanliness and safety. He put himself in the running for mayor after his dad died, and cried when he was asked what his father would say about his mayoral ambition.
Tainted by family crime, pumped full of aspiration, he crafted his own American dream. The one that for most others remains a dream, or an impossibility.
Like Tony Soprano from the hit HBO show, he owns a house in a good neighborhood, and runs businesses that do well while he embraces the complications of inheritance.
And like Soprano, his viewers love him even more because he faces the trouble in his past – through that struggle his money gains humanity.
He served on the board of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, made famous by Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown.” He was president of the L.A. Police Commission and Chair of the USC Board of Trustees during numerous upheavals and betrayals of trust.
During his board tenure, the dean of the Keck School of Medicine provided methamphetamine to a young woman with whom he was having an affair, USC gynecologist George Tyndall had been sexually abusing students for more than 30 years, and the school was a centerpiece of Operation Varsity Blues, an admissions scandal that saw a number of wealthy parents charged with bribing their children’s way into universities.
He still dodges questions about those problems. When asked about his lack of transparency on the Tyndall case his answer was plain.
“There wasn’t any lack of transparency,” insisted Caruso, responding to an Annenberg Media journalist after the town hall meeting at Salon Princesita.
“I disagree respectfully with the premise of your question.”
After that, Caruso still manages to paint himself as a hero. Maybe that is why his constituents love and pray for him. After all, he declared, “the scandals are over – and cleaned up.”
